Poolside Driveway

For almost as long as there have been automobiles, automakers have been trying to show off their cars as aspirational purchases by showing them in aspirational settings in their ads and promotional photos. Many of these settings get reused to the point where we can consider them to be tropes. What better to illustrate this than one of my personal favorite vintage auto advertising tropes: A car parked beside a swimming pool. After all, nothing says glamour and riches like an in-ground pool (sorry above-ground pools, nothing personal). Unfortunately, many of these idealized settings require more than a bit of suspension of disbelief, where if you think for more than a few seconds about what is being depicted, the situation being pictured doesn’t really make any sense at all… read more >